The Real Tragedy: Lost Opportunity

The recent tragic death of 5 year old Dov Levitan was a terrible loss for his parents, family, and just about anyone who heard the story. But why is the sudden death of a young child being struck by a vehicle any more tragic than an elderly woman in her 70s who contracts pneumonia and dies within days?

Of course, the value of a human life according to the Torah is not based on age. We don’t have a ranking system that values people based on their age as the current health care plan being debated all over the country does. But in our minds, we realize subconsciously the acuteness when a young child dies. A young person who dies represents a tremendous loss of opportunity to accomplish. There are billions of people in the world, but everyone has their own task to accomplish. Who knows if this child would have been the next gadol hador? Maybe he would have been a wealthy ba’al tzedaka, or an askin providing valuable chessed for thousands of people. We will never know, because his chance to do any of that was eliminated upon his untimely death. And that is the real tragedy of this event.

Whether you are sitting in kollel feeling unfulfilled, or stuck in a job that gives you no satisfaction, you are in a sense undergoing the same tragedy. Every moment that you do not utilize to accomplish, is opportunity that is lost forever. The lost time will never come back to you, and the circumstances that presented themselves may never return.

If anyone could have done anything to save the child’s life, who wouldn’t do what they could to prevent such a tragedy?

If there is something that you can do to prevent the same tragedy from happening to yourself, shouldn’t you do what you can? So get up and move along in life. You have work to do, and very little time to accomplish it.

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Filed Under: Inspiration

Tags: accomplish • dov levitan • real job • tragedy